The other day, after an especially grueling week on call, I read something about a traditional healer somewhere in Africa who was chronically cranky and sick because her healing technique involved taking on so much of her patients’ ailments.
I had never met that lady, but I knew just how she felt, because I too felt like I had just given birth to seven babies, undergone three C-sections and was barely recovered from a life-threatening post-partum hemorrhage.

As the sun began to set over the Sheep Meadow in Central Park on a recent Friday night, hundreds of young, environmentally minded professionals gathered to kindle Shabbat candles and say hamotzi together.

Chasidic residents of Williamsburg and Borough Park are currently battling two dangerous disease outbreaks — a minor spread of the measles and a more serious eruption of the intestinal infection Shigella.

The models and movie stars filing past the phalanx of flashbulbs at the New Museum last week had not come to see the latest exhibition of contemporary art or next fall's fashions. They had been invited to the book launch party for "The 72 Names of God: Technology for the Soul," the latest publication from the Kabbalah Centre International.

One of the guests of honor at the recent commencement exercises of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, sitting at the far left of the first row of the sanctuary in Temple Emanu-El, was neither guest speaker, college official Nor financial supporter of the institution.
Dalia Samansky, a third-year rabbinical student at the school’s Los Angeles campus who received her master’s degree in L.A. the following week, was invited to the New York commencement as role model.
She had saved a life.

As Iran continues a policy of delay and division in the face of international concern about its nuclear weapons program, it is time for the Obama administration to reconsider one element of its strategy. That would be to find ways to support a growing movement within Iran that rejects the repressive rule of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the entrenched fundamentalist clerics in power.
As we have said before, there are no easy answers as Iran moves ever closer to the nuclear threshold.

A man who likes extinct languages, Mel Gibson had a chance to practice his Latin this summer — he made several mea culpas.Following his drunken, sexist, profane, anti-Semitic tirade in Malibu in July, the actor-director apologized to the police officers who arrested him. He apologized in a general public statement for saying “despicable” things.

This time of the year, radio listeners of all persuasions find ourselves flipping around the dial a bit. Some like the holid …I mean, Christmas, music and are looking for more, and some of us are looking for refuge, perhaps at a news station.

Maybe with the widespread usage of sattelite radio with its genre channels and MP3 playlists easily sent to your car’s speakers, we end up scanning a bit less than we used to, because we can have more control.